Dr. Obery Hendricks

Educational Background

BA Rutgers University

MDiv Princeton Theological Seminary

MA Princeton University

PhD Princeton University

Religious Affiliation

African Methodist Episcopal Church

Obery Hendricks is one of the nation’s most provocative and innovative commentators on the intersection of religion, politics and social policy in America. A widely sought lecturer and media spokesperson, Dr. Hendricks has been featured on C-SPAN, PBS, National Public Radio, al-Jazeera Television, NHK Japan Television, Air-America, Radio One, Fox News, the Discovery Channel and the Bloomberg Network. He has been a member of the Faith Advisory Council of the Democratic National Committee and the National Religious Leaders Advisory Committee of the Barack Obama presidential campaign. He is an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for American Progress and serves on the board of the Public Religion Research Institute. Dr. Hendricks is a featured writer for Godspolitics.com, an editorial advisor to the award-winning Tikkun magazine, a contributing editor to The Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, and a principal commentator in The Oxford Annotated Bible. The Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation calls his work “the boldest post-colonial writing ever seen in Western biblical studies.”

“Essential reading for Americans” is what The Washington Post called Dr. Hendricks’ most recent book, The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted. Social critic Michael Eric Dyson describes it as “an instant classic” that “immediately thrusts Hendricks into the front ranks of American religious thinkers.” The Politics of Jesus was the featured subject of the C-SPAN program “Class, Politics and Christianity.”

A former Wall Street investment executive and past president of Payne Theological Seminary, the oldest African American theological seminary in the United States, Dr. Hendricks is currently Professor of Biblical Interpretation at New York Theological Seminary and Visiting Scholar in both the Department of Religion and the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. He holds the Master of Divinity with academic honors from Princeton Theological Seminary, and both the M.A and PhD in Religions of Late Antiquity from Princeton University.

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[…] executive and former seminary president, he is currently Professor of Biblical Interpretation at New York Theological Seminary and Visiting Scholar in Religion and African American studies at Columbia University. His newest […]

[…] opportunity for a man to write something other than feminist fiction, but feminist fiction is what Dr. Obery Hendricks has written. Here is an image of him, used (as is the bookcover image) without permission but I […]